Opinion: The deep moral dilemma at the heart of the hostage deal

Editor’s note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

The announcement that Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement to free some 50 women and children Hamas captured during its brutal October 7 rampage in southern Israel, in exchange for a 4-day truce in Israel’s ground and air operation, comes as the first positive development in six weeks for some relatives of the more than 200 people abducted by the radical Islamist group that rules Gaza.

And it is certainly welcome news for Gaza civilians, who will be thankful for other elements of the deal: an increase in the amount of humanitarian aid entering the strip and the expected release of 150 Palestinians prisoners from Israeli jails — three for every one of the hostages freed, along with the possible extension of the truce of an extra day for every ten additional hostages.

Israel’s Supreme Court will review any petitions against the deal. After that, some hostages, likely to be mostly children, could start coming home by Thursday.

The deal, however, is hardly the stuff of unalloyed joy — for Palestinians or for Israel.

The war is not over. And the deal arguably strengthens Hamas, allowing it to claim credit, catch its breath and regroup. Whatever Palestinians feel toward the organization that unleashed this round of fighting — and we will not hear many in Gaza now openly criticize Hamas — there’s little question that as long as this group remains in power, the future looks bleak for Gazans.

For Israel this deal is bitingly bittersweet. Negotiating with a terrorist organization that has just slaughtered and brutalized more than 1,000 of the country’s citizens and remains committed to Israel’s destruction — repeatedly confirming that goal — is not only hard to swallow, it’s a moral and strategic dilemma of the highest order.

Israel has done this before, and paid a high price for it.

When Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit was taken hostage in 2006, the government ended up trading more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from its jails in exchange for his freedom in 2011. When the pale, reed-thin Shalit finally left Gaza after half a decade in captivity, one of the men let out of prison in the deal was Yahya Sinwar.

Sinwar is now the political head of Hamas in Gaza and believed to be the mastermind of the October 7 operation that killed about 1,200 people in Israel — more Jews than on any day since the Holocaust.

Still, the decision to trade was the correct one. Israel has a long tradition of going to great lengths to save individual citizens. Even if it ends up looking like a mistake in the arithmetic of war, with traded prisoners ultimately killing more people than the number of Israelis freed in the trade, making the painful deal is part of the nation’s core identity.

The trauma of October 7 threatened to upend that tradition. Almost every Israeli knows someone who was killed or kidnapped, or someone who lost a relative or friend that day.

Israelis have been learning more and more about the sheer horror of that day. It wasn’t just a massacre; it was a sadistic frenzy of murder. Hamas fighters’ own body cameras recorded its members slaughtering entire families. Israeli investigators reported seeing the bodies of small children burned aliv, and corpses found mutilated.

There are many reports of rapes, and Israel is compiling evidence of sexual assaults alongside Hamas’s own videotaped evidence of dismemberment and decapitation. Israelis are hearing from the victims and their families. The entire country is enveloped in anger and grief.

It’s not the kind of information that compels a nation to seek negotiations with the perpetrators.

Worse, Hamas leaders have repeated their pledge to continue their campaign, vowing to carry out similar missions again and again. And as Israel tries to remove Hamas from power, the suffering of the people of Gaza — trapped between Hamas and Israel — has become heartbreaking, adding to the wrenching moral choices in this conflict, the balancing of life versus security.

For some Israeli hardliners, it was time to change Israel’s hostage calculus, to keep fighting, and to deny Hamas a break during which it is sure to regroup, redeploy and strengthen itself. But their voices were drowned by the strength of the hostages’ families. In a matter of days after the attack, despite or because of their anguish, the families managed to organize themselves into a powerful political force.

Keep an eye on them. After the war, they will remain the tip of the spear as the Israeli people likely demand the resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under whose watch Israel suffered the worst day in its history.

Netanyahu’s fate will not be eased by making this deal, even if the overwhelming majority of Israelis support the decision. They simultaneously support the government’s aim of fighting Hamas so it can no longer threaten Israel. The two objectives are clearly in conflict with one another. But that’s how it is with moral dilemmas.

The war has been brutal, because Hamas embeds itself among civilians, because Hamas did nothing to build shelters for the people, building them only for its own fighters, and because a limited number of Palestinians have been allowed to flee the fighting into neighboring countries.

Egypt, which has fought extremists in the Sinai Peninsula, which borders Israel, worries about a sudden inflow of large numbers of Palestinian refugees entering and turning Sinai into a stage for launching attacks against Israel, which could destabilize it. It worries also about creating a new long-term refugee population, whose return to Israeli-controlled territory would be uncertain .

Perhaps there was a way for Israel to fight Hamas with fewer civilian casualties –— I would not claim to know. But there was no way for Israel to allow Hamas – armed and funded by Iran — to stay in power at Israel’s doorstep. This is not about a Palestinian state. Hamas is not interested in two states, as it tells us over and over. It wants to destroy Israel, and its charter suggests that any agreement that allows Israel to survive, “is null and void.”

Even so, Israel had to negotiate.

For Israel, the events of October 7 brought echoes of the Holocaust. And it wasn’t just because of the slaughter. It was also because Hamas was founded on a 1988 Covenant of genocide. Hamas leaders still proclaim their antisemitic, genocidal designs. “Oh, Allah, bring annihilation upon the Jews,” preached a Hamas official a few weeks before the attack.

Imagine having to negotiate with the people who, days after the attack, when asked if their goal is “the complete annihilation of Israel,”answered “Yes, of course!”

Hamas is still holding almost 80% of the hostages. This entire process of negotiating a truce is emblematic of the terrible options that have dominated this conflict since the day Israelis woke up to find thousands of Hamas terrorists breaking into their homes with orders to “kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.”

This news of the hostage release, and the pause in the fighting, and the increase in humanitarian supplies, is cause for relief for many families, and a breather for millions.

But it’s hardly cause for celebration. It’s a sign of a deep moral dilemma that will continue playing out in profound human suffering.